Friday, April 12, 2013

Apparently, self-abuse is so prevalent among the younger
generation that it needed a poster child. It has now found one. Her name is Cat
Marnell.

Marnell has written for websites I do not frequent on topics
that I mostly ignore. But, Simon & Schuster sees something marketable
in her verbal ramblings and has given her a book deal worth $500,000.

Let’s hope that Marnell does not spend it all on drugs.

In her book Marnell will regale us with stories of her drug abuse
and of her thrilling sexual escapades. One wonders whether she could have
indulged her sexual appetites as much as she did without her biochemical
support system.

For what it’s worth, Marnell’s parents are therapists. Her
father is a distinguished psychiatrist and her mother is a social
worker-therapist.

One can be forgiven for comparing Marnell to Lena Dunham,
whose parents were both artists. Clearly, Dunham got the better of the deal.

Anyway, Marnell was introduced to drugs by her father. When
she was 14 he wrote her first prescription for Adderall.

For those who think that psychiatrists believe that there
is a pill for everything, Dr. Marnell's behavior will help buttress you opinion.

Jenna Sauers of Jezebel has read Marnell’s book proposal.
It’s not a portrait of a lady and it’s not a portrait of the artist. I would
like to think that it’s more an anomaly than a norm, but I suspect that Simon &
Schuster did not put down half-a-million on an anomaly.

Sauers summarizes Marnell’s opening biographical sketch.:

It
details her childhood in Bethesda, Maryland, and her relationship with her
psychiatrist dad ("a rage-filled narcissist to us but an upstanding
conservative Republican and Washingtonian magazine
'Best Psychiatrist' to everyone else") and therapist mom ("a
diabetic, anorexic...an emotional vacant lot, 95 lbs. all the time with dead
eyes.") Her childhood sounds like a monied, WASP-y kind of hell: domestic
violence, a father screaming "Real silver doesn't go in the
dishwasher," and filet mignon in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house.
Marnell mentions the family dining table cost $5,000. "All I've ever
wanted my whole life," she says, "was a way to escape and get numb."

I’m betting that she will not be dedicating the book to her
parents.

I am intrigued by Marnell’s wish to get numb. Someone who
works so hard at being outrageous and accumulating cringe-worthy thrills is
probably seriously desensitized, thus, numb to life’s joys.

Jezebel allows
us to examine Marnell’s prose style. In her proposal, Marnell wrote:

Senior year was more of the same. I bought
ecstasy in bulk from legendary teen drug lord Sketchy Ralph, and sold it to
underclassmen at an AIDS Day Awareness dance. I was kicked out — "asked to
leave," as they say — a month before graduation, over three months pregnant
with the student government president's baby. At the time of my dismissal, I
had the top GPA in the class (tied with the German genius Marcus, natch) and
was Tatania [sic] in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." [...]

Oh yes, and that pregnancy? Turns out I'd let it
go to the second trimester and had to have a violent, no-anesthesia abortion in
a ghetto clinic somewhere in the District, where I shook, wept, and sobbed in
agony on a table. My mother accompanied me and in the "recovery room"
said very little — she is not a nurturer, that one! — but did hand me a bottle
of Xanax prescribed to me by my father, a prescription written in advance that
I didn't ask for. And that, my friends, was how I was introduced to my good
friend benzodiazepines, a family of pills I have taken daily nearly every day
of my life since.

Presumably, Marnell is telling these sad stories in order to titillate the masses. Unfortunately, some people will read them and think that hers is a life worth having.

Happily, Sauers does not count among them. She understands the Marnell is offering a portrait of someone who has no sense of personal responsibility.

Sauers describes it well:

Marnell's
interest in drugs is broad and catholic. Here's Marnell on taking
anti-psychotics, which are "easy to score from psychiatrists" because
they're not narcotics: "I always welcomed any feeling that legitimate
mental illness was finally overtaking me (it's never stuck, alas), for this
would explain my bad states and also protect my pills, my pills, my
pills."

Marnell
seems to want very badly to be seen as a victim — of her parents' emotional
distance, of their preference for expressing care in the form of pharmaceutical
prescriptions, of her user boyfriends. But her proposal describes her being
afforded the kinds of second, third, and fourth chances that most people don't
get. Coworkers cover for her when she can't even bring herself to write
"200 words, say, on the new spring lipstick shades." Frankly, Marnell
gets the kinds of first chances
people not of her background are rarely offered. Her bosses defend her to
higher-ups. Media companies she works for — Condé Nast, Say Media, and Vice —
pay for her stints in rehab and hospital care. Even as Marnell remains the type
of person who stops to apply "some sort of gooey red raspberry mask"
to her face when she wakes at 9:37 on the morning of a very important 10 AM
meeting, for which she is completely unprepared.

4 comments:

She is not an anomaly. Most young people grow up to be useful but it seems as though a larger than normal number have no redeeming value, such as Cat. Wealth makes her choices possible. Her Keepers have not yet paid a high enough price to stop her behavior. I know a seventeen year old whos' career goal is SSI. His plan is to never work a day in his life. He probably will have a sucessfull career.